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the western disinformation about russia is staggering.... but....
WARNING — BULLSHIT STORY FOLLOWS: Among the many grim milestones of a bloody war in Ukraine that has now been going for four years was one reached recently: For the first time since its invasion, Russia has lost troops faster than it can replace them. "In the last month, Russia actually lost more people in terms of those killed in action and grievously wounded than it's been able to actually recruit," said Fiona Hill, a renowned Russia analyst and foreign affairs expert. "That is something of a milestone. People have always looked at that as a kind of tipping point. "I wouldn't say that it actually is at the moment." There are several reasons why the milestone is not a tipping point. Few analysts are predicting an end to the hostilities in Ukraine any time soon, despite the regular flurries about peace talks. Even fewer believe Russian President Vladimir Putin will desist from pursuing the war unless he achieves his aim: complete control over Ukraine.
FIONA HILL IS A BULLSHITTER, WITH A PORKY DEGREE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF GROSSSHITUS... THE GOAL OF PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN IS NOT TO CONQUER UKRAINE... IT IS: NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT) THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN. THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV..... CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954 TRANSNISTRIA TO BE PART OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION. RESTORE THE RIGHTS OF THE RUSSIAN SPEAKING PEOPLE OF "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT) RESTITUTE THE ORTHODOX CHURCH PROPERTIES AND RIGHTS RELEASE THE OPPOSITION MEMBERS FROM PRISON A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA. A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE EU..... EASY. THE WEST KNOWS IT. FIONA HILL DOES NOT KNOW ANYFINK...
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THE RATE OF ATTRITION IS MORE THAN 1,100 NASTY YUCKRAINIAN [NAZI KIEV REGIME] TROOPS FOR 50 GLORIOUS RUSSIANS PER DIEM... AND THE RUSSIANS, AS WE'VE KNOWN OVER THE YEARS, ARE VERY PATIENT, CAUTIOUS, METHODICAL, INVENTIVE AND UNWILLING TO KILL CIVILIANS — ONLY MILITARY AND RELATED TARGETS, CONTRARILY TO THE KIEV ZELENSKAKAKY REGIME THAT BOMBS SCHOOLS AND MARKETS IN RUSSIA...[OF COURSE THIS IS NEVER MENTIONED IN THE WESTERN MEDIA...] PRESENTLY RUSSIA HAS MORE THAN 1.2 MILLION RESERVE TROOPS IN TRAINING AND ABOUT 300,000 AT THE FRONT... DAILY, THE RUSSIANS TAKE "ANOTHER SETTLEMENT OR TEN" ADVANCING FAR TOO QUICKLY FOR TRUMP'S WISHES AND ADVANCING TOO SLOWLY FOR THE DETRACTORS IN THE WESTERN MEDIA... SO THERE ARE COLOUR STORIES IN THE WESTERN MEDIA, ABOUT THIS OR THAT UKRAINIAN PERSON FIGHTING AGAINST THE RUSSIAN INVADERS... OR [UNVERIFIED] STORY OF RUSSIAN OFFICERS SHOOTING THEIR OWN TROOPS — AND OF DIFFICULT NEGOTIATION FOR THE YUCKRAINIANS WITH THEIR RUSSIAN COUNTERPARTS... SURE... ZELENSKY DOES NOT WANT TO CEED ANY TERRITORY AND STILL DREAMS OF HIS HOLIDAYS ON A BEACH IN CRIMEA. THIS WON'T HAPPEN. RUSSIA WON'T ABANDON THEIR RUSSIAN BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF THE DONBASS AND THIS IS THAT. END OF STORY.......... BEYOND THIS, 25,000 SANCTIONS, RUSSIAN OIL AND GAS BANNED IN EUROPE (FULLY BY 2027), AN EU MORE RUSSOPHOBIC THAN EVER, AND AMERICA PLAYING DOUBLE GAMES, RUSSIA IS STILL PROSPERING... UNLIKE OUR DARWIN COLLEGE UNIVERSITY THAT GAVE LOUSY DIPLOMAS, RUSSIA IS WORKING... HARD!
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Charles Darwin University's (CDU) move to open a new international campus in London has been labelled "out of whack with community expectations" as the Northern Territory university faces a growing scandal at its Darwin campus. Yesterday, CDU announced vice-chancellor Scott Bowman had resigned after a TAFE accreditation scandal, which has affected almost 300 students. The students were erroneously declared qualified to work on construction projects, with the issue also triggering the departure of CDU TAFE's chief executive Michael Hamilton.
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AS WELL: Iran has reportedly signed a "secret" arms deal with Russia to acquire thousands of advanced shoulder-fired missiles to help boost its air defences. The Financial Times reported that a $US589 million ($734 million) agreement was signed in Moscow in December, citing leaked Russian documents seen by the FT and several people familiar with the deal. It said Russia would deliver 500 man-portable "Verba" launch units and 2,500 "9M336" missiles to Iran over three years. The Verba has been described as one of Russia's most modern air defence systems, which would give Iran increased capabilities to target low-flying aircraft, helicopters, cruise missiles and drones. The reports come as the US continues to build up its military presence in the Middle East. President Donald Trump has been threatening Iran with US strikes if a deal is not struck on Tehran's nuclear capabilities.
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NOW SEE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKS55kko8bEJeBRXgZRxBqA --------------------- SAY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT1irbR5bqU "If anyone thinks vehicles are imported mainly from abroad, that is far from the truth." In this episode of Made in Russia, we travel across the country — from the Volga river to the snowy tundra — to witness the transport revolution. Despite sanctions, production grew by 33% last year. From high-speed hydrofoils to the President's own car, domestic manufacturers are building a sovereign future. Inside this video: The West left, and Russia stepped up. Watch how Russia is building a sovereign economy. Timestamps:
AND PLENTY MORE, INCLUDING CHOCOLATE AND PLANE MANUFACTURING IN "SIBERIA".... WATCH.... ==========================
YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.
Gus Leonisky POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
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no peace....
US Proxy War on Russia: What Comes Next?
Brian Berletic
Behind the loud declarations of a desire for peace, a far broader and harsher strategy is unfolding — one whose consequences extend far beyond Ukraine.
Despite claims by the incoming Trump administration in late 2024 and early 2025 that it sought to quickly end the ongoing war in Ukraine, the US has instead steadily escalated it.Today, the Western media openly admits that ongoing long-range drone strikes deep inside Russian territory and maritime drone strikes on Russian energy exports are being carried out by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) — all while the US continues to pose as some sort of impartial “mediator” of the conflict.
In addition to this, the US is now preparing its European proxies for a more direct and dangerous role in the fighting inside Ukraine, shifting state funding away from serving the European public and toward military spending specifically aimed at Russia.
The US is seeking to whittle away key partners of the Russian-Chinese-led multipolar world until only Russia and China remainWhile the US is admittedly carrying out strikes on Russian energy production inside Russian borders and carrying out maritime drone strikes on tankers carrying Russian energy beyond them, it is positioning Europe to play a more aggressive role to intercept, board, and eventually blockade the so-called “Russian shadow fleet.”
Washington’s European proxies are also being pushed toward direct intervention inside Ukraine itself — to fill the growing void an incrementally collapsing Ukraine is creating.
Even as the US claims it seeks to distance itself from its own proxy war on Russia in Ukraine to pursue other geopolitical objectives, these objectives are connected to Russia’s most important partners around the world, including Venezuela and Cuba in Latin America, Iran in the Middle East, and China in the Asia-Pacific region.
In essence, regardless of the rhetoric, the US is still fully committed to its proxy war on Russia as just one part of a much larger war it is waging on emerging multipolarism itself — all part of maintaining US primacy worldwide.
US Goals in Ukraine Remain Unchanged
Long before Russia began its Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine in 2022, US policy papers had laid out the rationale to not only controlling Ukraine but using it as a belligerent proxy against Russia to over-extend it in the same manner the Soviet Union had been before collapsing at the end of the Cold War.
The 2019 RAND Corporation paper, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground,” made two important and revealing admissions. First, that continued US support for Ukraine, including the transfer of lethal aid to its military (beginning under the first Trump administration), was done specifically to provoke Russia — not protect Ukraine.
Second, the paper admitted that the resulting conflict would likely result in,“disproportionately large Ukrainian casualties, territorial losses, and refugee flows. It might even lead Ukraine into a disadvantageous peace.”
And this is precisely what is taking place.
The US objective then and now is not for Ukraine (or even Europe) to ever defeat Russia – but to raise the cost for Russia as high as possible as part of a much larger strategy aimed at,“causing Russia to overextend itself militarily or economically or causing the regime to lose domestic and/or international prestige and influence.”
Elsewhere in the paper, and in regards to Ukraine specifically, the US-engineered conflict in Afghanistan it drew the Soviet Union into in the 1980s, was used as a comparison to what the US seeks to replicate today.
Toward that end, despite the cost to not only Ukraine but the rest of Europe, the US continues this proxy war, forcing Russia to commit huge amounts of military manpower and equipment to the front — so much so that Russian commitments elsewhere, including to Syria, were first undermined before leading to Syria’s collapse altogether in 2024.
And while admitted US CIA drone strikes are targeting Russian energy production within Russia and energy exports by sea far beyond Russian borders, all seek to undermine Russia’s economic and thus military power — the targeting of Russian energy production and exports is also part of a much larger strategy aimed at encircling and containing China in the Asia-Pacific region.
The 2018 US Naval War College Review paper, “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China,” not only recommended increasing US military capabilities in the Asia-Pacific to implement a “distant blockade” (measures that have since been implemented), it also identified both China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Russian energy exports to China as obstacles to fully cutting off and strangling China itself.
While the paper recommended “kinetic action,” including “airstrikes and aerial mining” by the US to physically attack and sever the BRI, it did not prescribe any specific military action toward cutting Russian energy exports to China.
However, since then, CIA-organized drone strikes on Russian energy production mirror the very “kinetic action” recommended by the paper against the BRI. Regarding the BRI itself, falling short of the US attacking BRI infrastructure, Washington has instead armed and backed militants —particularly in Myanmar and Pakistan — to attack projects, engineers, and local security forces on its behalf.
What is taking shape is a multi-front war the US is waging against Russia, its allies, and of course against China first and foremost.
Weakening Russia is not an end, but rather a means.
Reality on the Ground in Ukraine
Russia has rapidly modernized and expanded its military — both before and ever since the US first politically captured Ukraine in 2014, then provoked the SMO in 2022.
Since then, Russia has managed to outproduce not just any single European nation or the US by itself, but the entire collective West in terms of armor, artillery ammunition, cruise and ballistic missiles, drones, air defenses, and electronic warfare capabilities — a feat that required years of planning and preparation long before launching the 2022 SMO.
It is almost a certainty that Russian military planners knew the conflict in Ukraine (and elsewhere) would be attritional in nature and organized its state-owned enterprises to prioritize production over profits in a diametrically opposing manner to Western military industrial production.
This has manifested itself on the battlefield in a war of attrition that has consistently favored Russia regardless of the steady escalation and provocations employed by the West.
Western analysts have regularly dismissed Russia’s progress in Ukraine — using territorial gains as the sole metric to do so. In reality, a front line can remain stagnant for years before the sudden and rapid collapse of forces on one side or the other.
To truly measure success in a war of attrition, metrics such as manpower recruitment and training, military industrial production, and causality rates should be considered instead — metrics that do not suit US narratives and are thus either lied about or not mentioned at all.
From late 2025 and into 2026, following the collapse of Pokrovsk and Myrnograd south of what remains of Ukrainian-held Donbass territory and steady Russian advances toward and around Lyman in the north, Ukrainian-held Slovyansk and Kramatorsk face the same sort of disruption to troop rotations and supply lines the Russians used to isolate and take many of the cities across the Donbass leading up to this point.
Russian forces will continue to apply pressure all along the front while moving drone operators, artillery, and other weapon systems closer and closer to the lines of communication Ukraine is using to control these two heavily fortified cities in the Donbass. The closer and more numerous these weapons systems become, the more complicated troop rotations and resupplying the cities become, and the more difficult it will become for Ukraine to continue holding them.
At the same time, Ukrainian troops are currently carrying out an offensive further south.
However, like all Ukrainian offensives previously, no matter how superficially successful they appear, unless manpower, arms, and ammunition shortages have been rectified (and they haven’t), such operations only result in higher casualties and a more rapid depletion of already scarce resources — casualties and the depletion of resources that will only accelerate an attritional victory for Russia.
What Comes Next
The US has already made it abundantly clear that it will not be ending its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine any time soon. Instead, it is positioning Europe to enter into the void rapidly depleting Ukrainian forces are leaving behind, to maintain constant pressure on Russia along the front, while it itself continues to attack Russian energy production within Russia’s borders and its European proxies prepare for more aggressive strategies targeting and even seizing ships carrying Russian energy abroad.
With the US political capture of Venezuela, pressure being placed on Cuba, and preparations for war with Iran rapidly advancing, the US is seeking to whittle away key partners of the Russian-Chinese-led multipolar world until only Russia and China remain.
Understanding the future of the conflict in Ukraine requires understanding both how the US-led unipolar world and the multipolar world are organized and operated, and what role the US proxy war on Russia in Ukraine plays in a much wider war Washington is waging on multipolarism worldwide.
Understanding that Europe is subordinated to the US, not standing in opposition to it, and that no matter what European leaders claim publicly, preparations to implement US directives involving Europe’s larger, more dangerous, and more direct role in the Ukraine conflict are already ongoing.
Moreover, Washington’s primary geopolitical objective must be understood clearly — it seeks primacy over all nations of the world. There is no negotiating with a party whose ultimate objective is the subordination and even elimination of those who seek to negotiate with it.
Only through building up the military, economic, political, and social power required to defend against, deter, and eventually disarm the US of its global aggression can the conflict in Ukraine — and conflicts everywhere else — be brought to a just and permanent end.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer
https://journal-neo.su/2026/02/25/us-proxy-war-on-russia-what-comes-next/
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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.
Gus Leonisky
POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
SEE ALSO:
MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The Russian armed forces have liberated the settlement of Grafskoye in the Kharkov region, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday.
"As a result of active and decisive actions, units of the Sever battlegroup liberated the Grafskoye settlement in the Kharkov region," the ministry said in a statement.
Russia's Tsentr battlegroup has eliminated up to 390 soldiers
Ukraine has also lost up to 355 soldiers in battles with the Russia's Vostok battlegroup and over 220 soldiers with the Sever battlegroup
https://sputnikglobe.com/20260225/russian-troops-liberate-grafskoye-settlement-in-kharkov-region--1123687259.html
lies of empire...
PATRICK LAWRENCE: To Whom Are Our Liars Lying & What Is the Point of Their Lies?
In America’s late-imperial phase, conjured realities are preferable to reality. The creak of history’s wheel has become unbearable such that forlorn attempts to silence it are the only remaining resort.
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
To make the case that those who purport to lead the Western post-democracies lie routinely about what they are doing and why they are doing it will not help you win friends and influence people.
That they are incessantly deceitful has been too obvious to too many people for too long. Never forget your Dale Carnegie and the imperative always to say something interesting.
Lately something interesting in this line has occurred to me.
It came to me last autumn — on Oct. 25 to be precise. I was reading The New York Post, as one must to keep one’s head clear in our complicated world, and came upon an opinion piece headlined “Vlad’s war of words.” It was the subhead that drew me in: “Don’t fall for his lies: Russia isn’t winning.”
How could I not read on? By last Oct. 25 it was sky-is-blue plain that Ukraine’s Nazi-infested military was losing its war with Russia and the Nazi-infested regime in Kiev was caught in a spiral of desperation. “Vlad” was hardly the only one to observe — as he did at the time — that Russia’s path to victory was clear.
Some snippets from the column that appeared under the byline of one Jack Keane:
“They’ve taken no major Ukrainian cities since 2022. They are fighting for fields and small towns at extravagant losses they can’t sustain.
… Putin is only still in the game because of Chinese, North Korean and Iranian support.
… Ukrainian drones have denied the Russians the ability to use tanks and mechanized vehicles at scale.
… Most Russian soldiers die in droves to advance just meters at a time.
… Leaked Russian government documents indicate that [the] country suffered on average 35,000 casualties per month from January–September 2025….”
And after 21 column inches of this material, the inevitable punchline:
“The path forward should include not only economic pressure but also increased military support for Ukraine. Force Putin to stop this war on our terms, not his.”
I will let these passages speak for themselves except to say when a writer insists that the vanquished must dictate the terms of cessation to the victor there would appear to be a troubled relationship with reality.
This piece was not the work of lightweights, light of weight as it may be. Jack Keane is a retired four-star general and now chairs the Institute for the Study of War, a regularly quoted think tank staffed with middling hawks well-connected in the active and retired military — David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, et al.
To locate the institute within the Beltway constellation, it was founded by Kimberly Kagan, sister-in-law of noted neocon Robert Kagan. It does not, per usual in these kinds of cases, reveal the sources of its funding.
Why would people so situated within the policy cliques traffic not only in bold-face lies but bold-face lies anyone paying attention knows are bold-face lies and that they, the people who tell the bold-face lies, know paying-attention people know are bold-face lies?
The mind goes back, as it often does these days, to that remark Hannah Arendt made in a conversation with a French free-speech activist not long before her death, in December 1975. “If everybody always lies to you,” she said to Roger Errera, “the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”
Fifty-one years on, it is time to take Arendt’s thought a step further. In our era of nobody believing anything — nobody who pays attention, I mean, as Arendt also meant — to whom are our liars lying and what is the point of their lies?
And here is what I find interesting. In America’s late-imperial phase, conjured realities are preferable to reality. The creak of history’s wheel, I mean to say, has become unbearable such that forlorn attempts to silence it are the only remaining resort.
In the resulting empire of lies it no longer makes any difference that no one believes anything. It does not matter, in other words, that America makes its way in the world on the basis of endless deceits. The only ones who to have to believe any of the lies are those telling them, and among these people pretending to believe them is sufficient.
Maintaining Meta-Reality
I do not mean to lead readers into a thicket of convoluted logic, but we live in a time of densely convoluted logic. When Jack Keane writes an opinion piece of start-to-finish lies, do you think he gives any thought to the readers of The New York Post? Of course not.
The only readers that matter to Jack Keane are his fellow ideologues, no one else. He is merely doing his bit to maintain the meta-reality within which the imperium can continue to conduct its illogical business as if it were the logical thing to do.
I have wondered for several years, since it was clear Russia was on the way to victory in Ukraine, how all the Jack Keanes among us would manage defeat in a war they were simply unprepared ever to lose. Now it is clear: They have retreated into a sort of collective psychosis. And in this state they subsist, all by themselves, on fables.
Dominic Lawson, who descends from a line of prominent, minorly titled Tories, published a piece in the Jack Keane line in The Sunday Times this past weekend. “Recent events have confounded the conventional view that Russia is ‘winning,” Lawson writes. And then comes, among much else, the usual gathering of nonsensical statistics — “… last year Russia is estimated to have taken nearly half a million casualties,” etc.
I like the passive voice, always so comforting because so predictable. Estimated by whom?
And then a crop of bold, casually tossed-off assertions that do not survive even cursory consideration: “The poisoner in the Kremlin has no intention of agreeing to peace terms readily available.” Or this:
“Putin’s aims are revanchist, involving wars of annexation, rather than defence. Though, naturally, as in his preposterous claim to be “de–Nazifying” Ukraine, these are and will be expressed as being “in defence of the motherland.”
I love the “preposterous” and the coy quotation marks in the above passage.
“There is only one way Putin will leave Ukraine” is the head atop this piece. And Lawson’s conclusion, right up in the subhead: “Nothing but defeat will stop it.”
Nothing but defeat. Yes, let Ukraine march on to triumph.
Fable Elevated to Thesis
There are reams of this stuff around just now, more all the time, it seems. And it is not enough to tag it clunky propaganda and leave it at that: This meta-reality is congealing before our eyes into a view of the world, a new geopolitical take, that we can accept if we wish, although it does not matter one way or the other if we do or do not.
Foreign Affairs, house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations, published a piece to this effect in its March–April edition under the title, “The Multipolar Delusion.”
In it, C. Raja Mohan, a professor of big think at a privately funded university in the environs of New Delhi, makes the case that the world as more or less universally understood since Germans dismantled the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Cold War drew to a close was a phantom, a collective misapprehension:
“The Trump administration has embarked on a forceful reassertion of American power by imposing onerous tariffs, intervening in other countries, and brokering peace negotiations and commercial dealmaking across the world. China and Russia have resisted Washington on select issues, but they have been unable to mount a comprehensive challenge to the United States’ effort to restructure global rules….
The reality is that the world is still unipolar. The illusions of multipolarity have not created a more balanced international arrangement. Instead, they have done the opposite: they have empowered the United States to shed previous constraints and project its power even more aggressively. No other power or bloc has been able to mount a credible challenge or work collectively to counter U.S. power. But unlike in the prior period of unipolarity that emerged at the end of the Cold War, the United States is now exercising unilateral power shorn of responsibilities.”
Mohan’s point about the extravagant irresponsibility of the Trump regime can hardly land more squarely. But his argument is otherwise an ahistorical mess.
Mohan ignores the late-imperial desperation that has unmistakably come to drive the policy cliques in Washington beginning in 2001, I would say, and culminating in the Trump regime’s incoherence. He seems not able to understand the long durée of our moment — the gradual process by which one world order will replace another.
The Mohan piece is worth reading. It is fable elevated to thesis. Simplicius makes a similar point, absent my term, in a well-done analysis of Mohan published over the weekend in his Substack newsletter under the headline “Multipolarity a ‘Delusion’ in Face of Trump’s New Imperialism?”
Simplicius’ answer, and mine: The delusion lies with those, Mohan exemplary of them, who take the doings of the Trump regime as anything more than an edifice built on lies and illusions. It represents an inherently unstable interim, not an era.
With Trump’s “massive armada” gathered in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf in apparent preparation for another attack on Iran, Vice President J.D. Vance has been speaking around the country to warn that Iran presents a direct threat to U.S. national security.
Going one better, Steve Witkoff, the New York landlord serving as Trump’s envoy, asserted over the weekend that the Islamic Republic is “probably a week away” from having what it needs to build a nuclear bomb.
This stuff is so unrooted in reality not even the Israeli press has taken Witkoff seriously. But reality, or being taken seriously, are, once again, of no importance to this regime.
Witkoff and Vance can lie, nobody will believe them, and they will know that nobody believes them, but it will not matter. They alone will believe themselves, or pretend to believe themselves, and the meta-reality of our time will continue to elaborate.
My mind goes to the historians as I consider this phenomenon. Will the fables by which so many events unfold in the third decade of the 21st century survive their scrutiny? Will the empire of lies go into the texts of the future as if it were real?
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being permanently censored.
TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. In recognition of the commitment to independent journalism, please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.
https://consortiumnews.com/2026/02/25/patrick-lawrence-to-whom-are-our-liars-lying-what-is-the-point-of-their-lies/
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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.
Gus Leonisky
POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46TYLd-DuKU
Russia’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, delivered a bombshell briefing to the Security Council on Tuesday, accusing the United Kingdom and France of covertly planning to supply Ukraine with "dirty bomb" components and French TN75 nuclear warheads.
Citing an emergency report from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Nebenzia alleged that London and Paris are attempting to bypass the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to provide Kyiv with a "wonder weapon" as U.S.-brokered peace talks in Geneva and Abu Dhabi reach a critical juncture.
While praising the Trump administration’s "responsible approach" to the negotiations, Nebenzia slammed European leaders, including UK PM Keir Starmer and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, for "losing touch with reality" and preparing the continent for a conventional and nuclear escalation.
The Kremlin warned that any acquisition of nuclear technology by the Zelensky regime would be met with an immediate Russian rebuff, marking the most significant spike in nuclear rhetoric since the start of the conflict four years ago.
A (1959?) REMINDER:
peacemonger....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvQT1QH5x1U
Europe Actually Thinks it's Helping Ukraine /Lt Col Daniel Davis & Ian Proud================
Why can’t western leaders accept that they have failed in Ukraine?
BY IAN PROUD
Since the war started, voices in the alternative media have said that Ukraine cannot win a war against Russia. Indeed, John Mearsheimer has been saying this since 2014.
Four years into this devastating war, those voices feel at one and the same time both vindicated and unheard. Ukraine is losing yet western leaders in Europe appear bent on continuing the fight.
Nothing is illustrative of this more than Kaja Kallas’ ridiculous comment of 10 February that Russia should agree to pre-conditions to end the war, which included future restrictions on the size of Russia’s army.
Comments such as this suggest western figures like Kallas still believe in the prospect of a strategic victory against Russia, such that Russia would have to settle for peace as the defeated party. Or they are in denial, and/or they are lying to their citizens. I’d argue that it is a mixture of the second and third.
When I say losing, I don’t mean losing in the narrow military sense. Russia’s territorial gains over the winter period have been slow and marginal. Indeed, western commentators often point to this as a sign that, given its size advantage, Russia is in fact losing the war, because if it really was powerful, it would have defeated Ukraine long ago.
And on the surface, it might be easy to understand why some European citizens accept this line, not least as they are bombarded with it by western mainstream media on a constant basis.
However, most people also, at the same time, agree that drone warfare has made rapid territorial gains costly in terms of lost men and materiel. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that since the second part of 2023, after Ukraine’s failed summer counter-offensive, Russia has attacked in small unit formations to infiltrate and encircle positions.
Having taken heavy losses at the start of the war using tactics that might have been conventional twenty years ago, Russia’s armed forces had to adapt and did so quickly. Likewise, Russia’s military industrial complex has also been quicker to shift production into newer types of low cost, easy build military technology, like drones and glide bombs, together with standard munitions that western providers have been unable to match in terms of scale.
And despite the regular propaganda about Russian military losses in the tens of thousands each month, the data from the periodic body swaps between both sides suggest that Ukraine has been losing far more men in the fight than Russia. And I mean, at a ratio far greater than ten to one.
Some western pundits claim that, well, Russia is advancing so it is collecting its dead as it moves forward. But those same pundits are the ones who also claim that Russia is barely moving forward at all. In a different breath, you might also hear them claim that Russia is about to invade Estonia at any moment.
Of course, the propaganda war works in both directions, from the western media and, of course, from Russian. I take the view that discussion of the microscopic daily shifts in control along the line of contact is a huge distraction.
The reality of who is winning, or not winning, this war is in any case not about a slowly changing front line. Wars are won by economies not armies.
Those western pundits who also tell you that Russia will run out of money tomorrow – it really won’t – never talk about the fact that Ukraine is functionally bankrupt and totally dependent on financial gifts which the EU itself has to borrow, in order to provide. War fighting for Ukraine has become a lucrative pyramid scheme, with Zelensky promising people like Von der Leyen that it is a sold investment that will eventually deliver a return, until the day the war ends, when EU citizens will ask whether all their tax money disappeared to.
Russia’s debt stands at 16% of its GDP, its reserves over $730 billion, its yearly trade surplus still healthy, even if it has narrowed over the past year.
Russia can afford to carry on the fight for a lot longer.
Ukraine cannot.
And Europe cannot.
And that is the point.
The Europeans know they can’t afford the war. Ukraine absolutely cannot afford the war, even if Zelensky is happy to see the money keep flowing in. Putin knows the Europeans and Ukraine can’t afford the war. In these circumstances, Russia can insist that Ukraine withdraws from the remainder of Donetsk unilaterally without having to fight for it, on the basis that the alternative is simply to continue fighting.
He can afford to maintain a low attritional fight along the length of the frontline, which minimises Russian casualties and maximises Ukraine’s expenditure of armaments that Europe has to pay for.
That constant financial drain of war fighting is sowing increasing political discord across Europe, from Germany, to France, Britain and, of course, Central Europe.
Putin gets two benefits for the price of one. Europe causing itself economic self-harm while at the same time going into political meltdown.
That is why western leaders cannot admit that they have lost the war because they have been telling their voters from the very beginning that Ukraine would definitely win.
At the start of the war, had NATO decided to back up its effort by force, to facilitate Ukrainian accession against Russia’s expressed objection, then the war might have ended very differently.
NATO would simply not have been able to mobilise a ground operation of sufficient size quickly enough to force Russia back from the initial territorial advances that it had made in February and March of 2022. That means, the skirmishes at least for the first month would have largely been in the form of air and sea assets, including the use of missiles.
There is nothing in NATO doctrine to suggest that the west would have taken the fight to Russia, given the obvious risk of nuclear catastrophe.
While it is pointless to speculate now, my view is that a short, hot war between NATO and Russia would have led to short-term losses of lives and materiel on both sides that forced a negotiated quick settlement.
Europe avoided that route because of the risk of nuclear escalation and the great shame of the war is that our leaders were nonetheless willing to encourage Zelensky to fight to the last Ukrainian, wrecking our prosperity in the process.
Who will want to vote for Merz, Macron, Tusk, Starmer and all these other tinpot statesmen when it becomes clear that they have royally screwed the people of Europe for a stupid proxy war in Ukraine that was unwinnable?
What will Kaja Kallas do for a job when everyone in Europe can see that she’s a dangerous warmonger who did absolutely nothing for the right reason, and who failed at everything?
Zelensky is wondering where he can flee to when his number’s up, my bet would be Miami.
So if you are watching the front line every day you need to step back from the canvas.
There is still a chance that European pressure on Russia will prevail, which makes this whole endeavour a massive gamble with poor odds.
More likely, when the war ends, Putin will reengage with Europe but from a position of power not weakness.
That is the real battle going on here.
https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/why-cant-western-leaders-accept-that
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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.
Gus Leonisky
POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
SEE ALSO: https://sputnikglobe.com/20260226/bodies-of-1000-ukrainian-soldiers-transferred-to-ukraine---medinsky-1123692508.html
MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Russia has transferred the bodies of 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers to Ukraine, and received the bodies of 35 Russian soldiers, Russian presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky said on Thursday.
"The bodies of 1,000 dead Ukrainian soldiers have been transferred to Ukraine. The bodies of 35 dead Russian soldiers have been handed over to Russia," Medinsky wrote on Telegram.
Russia has received the bodies of 35 fallen Russian soldiers, presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky added.
35/1000... THIS IS somewhat CLOSE TO THE RATIO OF "attrition"....
gigafactory.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcvngKttl0&t=315s
Huge News! Russia Opens Its First Giga Factory (Sanctions Failed!)Russia just built its first gigafactory for lithium-ion batteries, shaking up the game! Find out what they'll make, how recycling will work, and why Kaliningrad was chosen for this mega project. Plus, get the latest scoop on new tech, ships, and more. Don't miss out—subscribe for more updates and drop a comment on what wowed you most! #technology #energy #Russia #industry #batteries
This channel was created in collaboration with @b-b
0:00 - Introduction and Overview
0:35 - Recent Positive Developments in Russia
1:45 - Russia's First Gigafactory Unveiled
3:37 - Market Challenges and Opportunities
5:04 - Battery Recycling and Second Life Use
6:36 - Why Kaliningrad Was Chosen
8:21 - Future Expansion and Industry Impact
READ FROM TOP.
YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.
Gus Leonisky
POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.